


Missed Connections

by NightsMistress



Category: Vorkosigan Saga - Lois McMaster Bujold
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-11
Updated: 2015-07-11
Packaged: 2018-04-07 11:36:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4261905
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/NightsMistress/pseuds/NightsMistress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How did the conversation between Ivan and Gregor to bring Mark to see Gregor go in <i>Mirror Dance</i>?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Missed Connections

**Author's Note:**

  * For [100demons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/100demons/gifts).



> Thank you to egelantier for the beta!

The Vordarian Pretendership is on Gregor’s mind. He supposes that is natural, given what has happened. 

There is no challenge to his rule, nothing so much as a hint of a suggestion of it, but that is not what the Vordarian Pretendership means for him. It is far more insidious, more personal than the challenge to his rule. Instead it’s the death of a loved one, brought violently and by military weaponry. It’s the missed connections: a poorly tied shoe, a misplaced cryochamber. If Gregor were an ordinary man there would be time to grieve for Miles, but the Imperium must go on. _Vorbarras victorious,_ he thinks. It sounds a lot like Cordelia. He had never seen her so frozen as on the comm screen, telling him about Mark’s arrival on Barrayar. He wonders whether he too has that bleak midwinter look in his eyes. Is that something an emperor can have? Is that something _Gregor_ can have? Miles would have had something acerbic to say, but of course now his tongue has stilled for perhaps the first time since he was able to talk.

He wishes to be left alone with his grief, but that’s not an option. Aral had tagged onto Cordelia’s call, the two of them pretending that this was not the true purpose of the call. A favor: Gregor to meet Mark. Without Gregor’s approval, Aral’s desire that Mark be his heir would be stillborn and both Aral and Gregor knew it. He could not, and would not, refuse this request. 

And now it is time for him to call on a favor himself. There are many who have sworn their loyalty to him, rested their hands in his and sworn fealty to the Imperium and the man around which the Imperium pretends to turn around. There are few who love him, and he tries not to spend the coin of their love too freely, and that is respected in turn. 

Miles … Miles would draw only a little of what he was owed. Ivan, even less. In fact, Ivan has never called on Gregor at all, despite having the same access to Gregor’s time and energy as Miles. This request would be easier if he had.

He turns on his com console and dials Ivan’s number. After a moment, the screen turns on to show Ivan seated, still in undress greens, with an uncorked wine bottle on the coffee table. No glass; apparently Ivan still drinks out of the bottle. Ivan looks startled, but he always does when Gregor calls him. He does not look like a man broken under the weight of grief, but appearances have always been deceptive when it comes to Ivan. _Careful, boy,_ he thinks. _Watch, then act._ This time, it sounds like Aral. 

“Sire,” Ivan said, eyebrows raised. He surreptitiously slides the bottle out of view, in a movement that obscures the label from Gregor’s gaze. He hoped it wasn’t one Ivan had pilfered from the Vorkosigan cellars at some point, as he could have only done that with Miles’ collusion. Let it be one that he bought on the way home from his shift, one absent of memories.

“Good evening, Ivan,” Gregor says. “Off duty?”

“Yeah,” Ivan says. “I ‘spose everyone figured that when we find where Miles is hiding, I’ll have to go collect him.” He sounds put-upon, the long-suffering cousin to the hyperactive Miles. It was the role that he had played for Miles ever since they had all been children together: the follower and pack mule to Miles, the planet that revolved around Miles’ bright star. 

It’s a similar role to the one he plays for Gregor: the loyal follower who does what is expected of him by brighter minds but does nothing to shine himself. For not the first time Gregor wonders what role Ivan plays for himself when he’s alone. He can’t be a completely different person, as Gregor has known Ivan since he was an infant, but he suspects that the true Ivan is more complex than the shallow man he appears.

“You’ve been told what’s happened?” Gregor asks. 

“Oh yeah, Uncle Aral told me bits. How do you _lose_ a cryochamber, anyway?” Ivan says, screwing up his face in consternation. “I thought they were meant to be good at what they did.”

“It was portable,” Gregor says. He does not bite on Ivan’s bait about the Dendarii Mercenaries, because by all accounts they are good at what they do. They had to be, as Miles’s dual lives were dependent on their success. Or, at least, his lives had been. Another loose thread to either pull or reweave. 

Gregor’s head aches at all these decisions left unmade and the knowledge that he must decide what he is to do with them, and soon. Does Barrayar truly need a covert mercenary group? Now that they don’t have Miles at the helm, will their interests continue to align with Barrayar? Gregor makes a mental note to chase up a report from Simon about their loyalties.

“Still,” Ivan says. He shakes his head in apparent disbelief. “Typical Miles though. Even now he’s making us run around in circles and feeling stupid.”

“He is — was an ImpSec agent.” Gregor’s tongue trips over the tenses, and he is not sure if it is his tongue or his mind that is the traitor. “He just internalized the lessons better than most."

“Hah,” Ivan says sardonically, more in appreciation of the truth of Gregor’s statement than any real appreciation of a joke. “We are sure he’s dead, right?”

“Quite sure.”

“It’s just … _Miles_. I can’t imagine him staying still for anything, y’know? He’d make you think he was invincible even with those casts all over him.”

This is true. Gregor is reminded, sharply, of Miles in his casts, the third that year, stumbling across the room to say goodbye to Gregor when he was about to go to his preparatory academy. He had waved off Bothari and the offer of a chair, somehow retaining his balance. To look at him, you wouldn’t have known that he’d broken both ankles that morning.

Gregor shakes his head minutely to dispel the memory.

“Anyway,” Ivan says. “What’s up?”

“I’ve called to ask a favour.” I, not We. It’s a deliberate choice. He is aware of Ivan and Mark’s history through ImpSec’s terse accounts, but Ivan is aware of his duty. Gregor does not want Ivan’s loyalty in this, but his love. Love for Barrayar, for Miles. For Gregor, and the childhood that they share. It is a coin that Gregor does not want to spend, but one that Barrayar would require him to.

Ivan looks startled again, and more than a little wary. He wasn’t raised by Cordelia and Aral, not like Gregor and Miles were, but he’s been around the four of them long enough to understand that there is a trick to this. “What is it?”

“I would like to meet Mark.”

Gregor watches as the meaning of his request dawns on Ivan. He isn’t as fast on the uptake as Miles would have been, and he can see how the impatient Miles would have chafed at having to wait for Ivan to catch up. Still, there’s something rewarding in being surprised at how quickly Ivan goesfrom puzzled bemusement to appreciation of what Gregor is going to do.

“You’re gonna let him be Uncle Aral’s heir?”

“That’s not for me to decide,” Gregor says carefully. He always speaks carefully, because he does not know who is listening. He had planned to not cast a vote if it came to one. He rarely does vote, if it’s not necessary, a fortuitous political position under the circumstances. The only thing that would be worse for the stability of Barrayar than no clear Lord Vorkosigan would be a Lord Vorkosigan appointed by imperial fiat.

“Your approval would _help_ ,” Ivan points out. “Even those old fossils would know that Mark’s the best option.”

Gregor does not commit. Gregor cannot commit. The Emperor of Barrayar cannot be seen to favour one valid claim over another, especially one that is as complex as Mark’s. Aral believes he can force the issue with the other Counts and make them accept Mark as his heir. Perhaps he is right. But Gregor knows that there is another option, though it would break Aral’s heart. It is an unspoken understanding that Aral will never allow Ivan to succeed him as Count Vorkosigan, because it would put him one step closer to being Emperor, and the late, tragic Padma had died from that proximity. That was why Ivan had been raised together with but separate from Miles and Gregor; had he been raised with them it would have suggested that he was a very viable option, and one that Aral himself appreciated.

Judging by the look of dawning horror on Ivan’s face, his line of thought had followed the same route as Gregor’s. It is not surprising; Ivan has been Miles’ heir and so would have been thinking about this ever since he got the news. “Oh no,” Ivan says fervently. “You know I don’t want it.”

“I know.” Gregor did know. There were several plots to remove Miles as Aral’s heir when they were children. The reasons for their failure as posited by ImpSec were the cult of personality around Aral, Miles’ own innate strength of personality, and Ivan’s complete ignorance of the plot. Gregor, when looking back, wondered how ignorant Ivan had truly been. After all, Ivan had demonstrated over the past few years a knack of avoiding exposing anything that would be truly devastating if it were to come out. 

“We’ve had worse than a clone,” Ivan says, clearly going on while Gregor was distracted. “We’ve had a _donkey_.”

“I know.” It was, after all, the precedent trotted out in almost every sense of the word whenever there were discussions about something new or novel in Barrayar. Gregor wondered whether anyone could have envisaged the effect a donkey had had on future generations of Barrayarans.

“Miles will have a fit,” Ivan adds. “He’s adamant that the little runty bastard is his brother.”

“But not you?” Gregor says, watching Ivan’s face intently. 

“I don’t have to like him,” Ivan says, and his evasion is telling. “His existence is fine.”

“I have higher standards of a future Count Vorkosigan than mere existence,” Gregor says mildly. 

“He’s not Miles,” Ivan says, with a peculiar intensity in his words. Miles had said something similar when telling Gregor about it, with a similar kind of intensity, but Gregor knows that their motivations were quite different.

Struck by a sense of perversity, Gregor makes his next comment in a desire to see how things would go. “Cordelia’s proposed that Mark could go to Beta Colony.”

He is rewarded by Ivan looking utterly horrified at the thought. “Oh God, no,” he says fervently. “Him, out on his own? We saw what happened! Wasn’t ImpSec meant to keep an eye on him?

“ImpSec did,” Gregor says. “He’s not a Barrayaran subject, but they did keep tabs on him.”

“It wasn’t enough,” Ivan points out. “He got Miles killed.”

That, of course, was the problem in the end. Gregor has read the reports, knows how the events had unfolded, and that Miles would have been the first to reject that version of events. However, this wasn’t the time or place to correct Ivan. Not now, while Miles is still missing and everything is still so uncertain. Gregor cannot predict how Ivan would react. Still, it’s heartening that Ivan does not seem to be planning a challenge on Mark’s legitimacy as a legacy gift to Miles. If there is anything that could cause Ivan to surrender his carefully carved out neutrality from Barrayaran politics, Gregor thinks it would be Miles’ body or a belief that Mark is a danger to Gregor. 

“I suppose you’ll want me to bring him ‘round,” Ivan says, with very little grace. Gregor is not sure what role this is part of. Is it the put-upon subordinate? The long-suffering cousin to Miles? Or the man who has lost the axis around which he turns? 

“Yes,” Gregor says. “You’re an officer, so if you’re there we won’t need a bodyguard.”

“True,” Ivan concedes with a nod. “He’s screwy in a way different way from Miles. Stick him in a room with your usual grunt, someone’ll get killed. Probably him.” He shrugs. “I’ll do it. Been meaning to see how Uncle Aral and Aunt Cordelia are doing.”

“Pass on my regards?”

“Sure, no problem.”

Gregor disconnects the call, leaving him alone with his thoughts. Miles was a tough act to follow. He had a way about him that caused your breath to catch in your throat, hoping beyond all rational belief that he succeeded. He had won the loyalty of the Vorkosigan District, something that should have been impossible. He had served, and bled, and crawled but he had never stopped for anything. Miles had burned so bright and fierce that it really should not have been any surprise at all that he had gone out in a blaze of gunfire.

No. There is no time for Gregor to think about that. The Imperium must go on. He will meet Mark tomorrow. He knows Aral’s wish. He knows Ivan’s.

But he cannot stop thinking about the Vordarian Pretendership.


End file.
